Virtual roundtable: Leveraging data to fuel innovation
In the weeks following the Health Innovation Summit, hosted in June by Drug Store News and Mack Elevation in partnership with CVS Health, DSN assembled a virtual panel of suppliers and marketers to discuss the future of health and wellness, how best to address and appeal to the changing needs of today’s younger consumers, driving innovation and more. Find out why these leading health-and-wellness supplier executives and brand marketers are focusing their efforts on digital and social media.
DRUG STORE NEWS: How is your company thinking differently about the future of health and wellness, and what is your organization doing to better enable your brands to help consumers along their own personal healthcare journeys?
Sharon Glass, SVP of Brand Development, Catalina Marketing: Through the combination of attitudinal and purchase-based studies, we have developed powerful health-and-wellness shopper segmentations that identify shopper profiles by needs and preferences across health, pharmacy, foods and beauty. We have deep insights into consumer purchase behavior, but also understand some of the motivations and influencers behind it.
We look beyond purchase tendencies to understand how a consumer’s life situations accelerate, amplify or disrupt these tendencies. For example, we can identify a consumer’s adoption of new health habits or how changes in weather conditions will impact buying behavior within a given geographic area. This deeper and more comprehensive knowledge enables us to more relevantly engage each unique consumer along their journey. Our omni-ready marketing performance platform acts and learns at every consumer touchpoint, then activates in real-time to drive health regimens, provide self-care strategies for nutrition and offer solutions to help shoppers manage chronic health conditions and lead healthier lives.
Andrew Archambault, chief customer officer, nbty: Nature’s Bounty takes a 360-degree approach to supporting an individual’s healthcare journey. There is consistency in our message, from traditional consumer marketing to our shopper marketing efforts, pre-, during and post-shop.
An enhanced digital marketing focus, social media presence and education and selection support on our brand websites helps consumers find exactly what they are looking for. We understand that our consumers are blending information from multiple sources in making healthcare decisions, and we want to bring clarity to that journey, rather than add noise.
Kimberly Vigliante, SVP of Sales and Marketing, Nature’s Truth: At Nature’s Truth, we believe that the future of health and wellness is transparency, and that is how we are building our brand as it grows. Health and wellness is no longer limited to traditional vitamins and supplements that were popular with the baby boomer generation. Now, there are a lot more components to health and wellness than ever before. Health and wellness is now about the senses — how you feel, what you put on your skin, how you fuel your body — and items that are better for you overall. With this need for more comes the need for consumers to know what each product is made of. They want to know where ingredients came from, how they are processed and where they are manufactured.
Consumers now are much more knowledgeable and label-conscious. With information so readily available, consumers tend to do their own research. They know what they want and don’t want to put in their bodies. Many want clean products from a company they can trust. To meet this increasing need, we, as a company, believe in being transparent to the customer through our truth in labeling initiative. Many of our products are non-GMO, vegan, gluten free, dairy free, etc. While we are always on the lookout for emerging trends, we continue searching for only the best ingredients to produce the highest-quality products, including adding organic items to our brand.
Dennis Curran, Chief Customer Officer and VP of U.S. Sales, GSK Consumer Healthcare: We spend a lot of time thinking about the future of health and wellness and how we will stay ahead of consumers’ ever-changing needs. Whether those needs relate to how she shops, where she shops or what information she is evaluating before she shops, we have an obligation to meet those needs.
This notion is so important to us that we designed a suite of labs right in our U.S. headquarters. Our Shopper Science Lab, Consumer Sensory Lab and R&D Lab are positioned to work together in real-time to create and test products and concepts that are designed to make consumers’ lives better.
Carol Carrozza, VP of Marketing for North American Sexual Wellness, Ansell: LifeStyles discovered an insight in recent years around what we believe is the ‘missing piece’ of sexual health marketing — thought leadership and service/advice. We are no longer just marketing a product; [we] now support products with best-in-class thought leadership, [and are] able to recommend products for specific consumers and design products based on changing consumer needs.
Delivery also is a fundamental requirement in the sexual wellness space where consumers no longer want to wait for slow, traditional delivery of product that they need now. … We call [this] a distress purchase. So, we are putting plans in place to optimize delivery of products so they’re available when the consumers need them. This is a huge departure in thinking from placing products on a shelf and waiting for consumers to walk by and select; now they can utilize a mobile app to order, and we believe we can deliver within the optimum window. This requires investment, and LifeStyles is looking at the opportunities for leading this change.
DSN: For years, the focus in health and wellness has been around helping seniors and baby boomers live longer and stay healthy. That’s really still “the present” of health and wellness — but what about the future? What is your company doing to connect to — and make meaningful connections with — millennials and Generation Z? What does health and wellness look like to these younger consumers